All Joan's faculties sharpened in this period. She felt her own
development--the beginning of a bitter and hard education--an
instinctive assimilation of all that nature taught its wild people
and creatures, the first thing in elemental life--self-preservation.
Parallel in her heart and mind ran a hopeless despair and a driving,
unquenchable spirit. The former was fear, the latter love. She
believed beyond a doubt that she had doomed herself along with Jim
Cleve; she felt that she had the courage, the power, the love to
save him, if not herself. And the reason that she did not falter and
fail in this terrible situation was because her despair, great as it
was, did not equal her love.

That morning, before being lifted upon his horse, Kells buckled on
his gun-belt. The sheath and full round of shells and the gun made
this belt a burden for a weak man. And so Red Pearce insisted. But
Kells laughed in his face. The men, always excepting Gulden, were
unfailing in kindness and care. Apparently they would have fought
for Kells to the death. They were simple and direct in their rough
feelings. But in Kells, Joan thought, was a character who was a
product of this border wildness, yet one who could stand aloof from
himself and see the possibilities, the unexpected, the meaning of
that life. Kells knew that a man and yet another might show kindness
and faithfulness one moment, but the very next, out of a manhood
retrograded to the savage, out of the circumstance or chance, might
respond to a primitive force far sundered from thought or reason,
and rise to unbridled action. Joan divined that Kells buckled on his
gun to be ready to protect her. But his men never dreamed his
motive. Kells was a strong, bad man set among men like him, yet he
was infinitely different because he had brains.